Speaker
Description
Wide-area cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys, while optimised for precision cosmology, also contain many thousands of active galactic nuclei (AGN) observed at regular cadences. The majority of these AGN are blazars with highly variable fluxes due to relativistic shocks and motions in their jets. Observing them in millimetre wavelengths (mm) with CMB telescopes fills in a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is traditionally understudied, probing deeper into the jets than longer-wavelength radio data. Recently, robust sinusoidal variations in radio and millimetre light curves have provided strong evidence for supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHB) in a subpopulation of AGN. I will present AGN light curves from observations by the Atacama Cosmology Telescopes (ACT) and describe lessons learnt from the data reduction. I will also outline their general properties and some of the exciting science they enable, particularly SMBHB studies. Finally, I will describe how further work on existing ACT data and future data from the Simons Observatory (SO), will produce a library of AGN mm light curves of unprecedented size and utility.
| Would you be interested in presenting a poster if the conference is oversubcribed? | Yes |
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